Shaping Spirituality: A Study Of A Folk Faith Holy Land In Southern Fujia

The study of sacred places and pilgrimage is currently on the rise in international religious studies,mainly focusing on Western institutional religions and giving rise to two main theories.Chinese folk beliefs are unique in that they are populist and diffuse,retaining a wealth of historical information in the process of change,pointing directly to the religious and faithful living conditions of the people,and are an important part of overseas Chinese religions.The study of local naturally occurring beliefs helps to construct a theoretical system of Chinese religious sacred places.Taking the formation and development of sacred places as an entry point,this article examines the factors and characteristics,evolution and development of Chinese folk beliefs in sacred places,using the belief in Guo Shengwang(Guangze Zunwang)and his ancestral temple,Fengshan Temple,in the town of Shishan,Nan’an,Quanzhou,Fujian Province,as a case study.Guo Shengwang is one of the four major faiths in southern Fujian,born in the Five Dynasties and honoured and ennobled by the Song and Qing dynasties,and the incense has been passed down for a thousand years.The location of the faith,Quanzhou,is characterised by its maritime civilisation,immigrant culture and multi-religious mix.This paper argues that folk belief sacred sites are sacred spaces and places with ’spirituality’ as a core element.Firstly,the birth of a sacred place revolves around the main deity to whom it is dedicated.Official history books and local chronicles provide authoritative narratives of the main deity,and stories of spiritual experiences are constantly attached to the main deity,making it the arrowhead deity of a certain region,so that the people’s perfect imagination of the deity is projected there.The people give the Lord God a ’spiritual experience’ and the Lord God gives the sacred place a ’spiritual power’.In the case of Guo Shengwang,who was seated in the body of a child,he eventually achieved the highest Confucian ideals of ’loyalty’ and ’filial piety’,accomplished the three immortalities of virtue,merit and speech,and was able to resist the Japanese and drive away the plague.In addition to the written texts,there are also oral traditions in the form of mediums and dreamt dreams,reflecting the spiritual power of Guo Shengwang.The second is the ’spiritual’ construction of geographical space.The sacred geography of southern Fujian was heavily influenced by indigenous Fengshui beliefs,and the four sacred sites of Guo Shengwang,centred on his ancestral home of Fengshan Temple,are all interpreted as Fengshui treasure points with animal figures,one of which is the mausoleum of the parents of the gods,and is at the heart of Guo Shengwang’s Fengshui story.Traditional culture places great importance on mountains,both in terms of geomancy and the invisible cosmic energy of ’Qi’,and the tendency of human thought to attach itself to geography,and the four sacred sites are interpreted in terms of the relationship between heaven and earth,yin and yang."The story of the ’land of the Son of Heaven’ represents a subtle compromise and obedience to royal authority at the local level,while the worship of the tombs has implications for animal worship,blood worship and the importance of the clan.In terms of the amount of aura in a sacred place,it is the centre and the periphery,with sites associated with the main deity and earlier in time being theoretically closer to the centre,and in practice the competition for sacred sites is a competition for subjectivity in the faith.Furthermore,there is the influence that religious celebrations and rituals bring to sacred sites.The sacred site of Guo Shengwang has both collective and individual rituals.The "Fengsheng Yingxiang" is an annual ritual in which the Li and Lu surnames of the two villages below Fengshan Temple take turns to be the furnace owners,who welcome the incense burners to the sacred space of the temporary altar where the year’s rituals are held.The ceremony is a manifestation of local clan-led,village fellowship,expanding influence and economic strength,and strengthening the ties between local residents and the sacred site.The ancestral sealing ceremony is a concentrated expression of Guo Shengwang’s filial piety.The main and accompanying rituals are held in front of the mausoleum of the god’s parents to pay homage to Lord Yang and God of Houtu,followed by a high-profile triple dedication ceremony.Personal rituals include the rituals of ’making sixteen years old’ and ’Taisui’,which entrust the gods to remove the risk of the fragile cycle of life,as well as the ritual of the burial of the soul.The gods protect the lives of the living and the souls of the dead,and the faithful express their gratitude in the form of a sheep.The interaction between the human and the divine further expresses the spiritual power and divinity of the sacred places and the gods.Finally,there are the new changes and dilemmas of the contemporary sacred places under the wave of intangible heritage of folk beliefs.After the reform and opening up,the Guo Shengwang sacred site has experienced three attributes,namely the heritage attribute,the tourist attraction attribute and the cultural festival attribute,each development stage covering the previous one,and the core of the religious sacred site-the faith attribute-is continuously weakened.The cultural festival,on the other hand,is a concentrated display of all attributes and a representation of communalised creedalism.Politicised secularism is characterised by the honouring of sacred places with an administrative hierarchy,with a hierarchical character.Economic secularism is the driving force behind the expansion and construction of sacred sites.Cultural festivals also provide a certain spiritual narrative.The sacred site is a region where the sacred and the secular are intermingled,reflecting the Chinese characteristic of ’human feelings as sacredness’.This paper argues that the history of the birth and change of the Guo Shengwang coincided with the historical development of the southern Fujian region,and that the evolution of the image and function of the deity can be seen as a symptom of the ideological incorporation of the southern Fujian region into the domination of the Central Plains(Confucianism),and that as the ancestral lands migrated,the faithful ’transplanted’ and ’copied’ in the new region "This situation is also a window into the interaction between Fujian and Taiwan and between Fujian and Southeast Asia.After the reform and opening up,sub-temples in Hong Kong,Macao and Taiwan,as well as overseas,have given impetus to the development of the holy land through pilgrimages and incense donations,and have also brought the ancestral land closer to the Chinese and overseas Chinese,firmly casting the memory of the Chinese national community.In short,no matter what changes and variations there are in history and the present,the "spirituality" of the sacred place is still given by the people and interacts with the local community in various modes of "doing religion".The beliefs of Guo Shengwang and Ma Zu,Qingshui Zushi,Baosheng Dadi and the Lady of Linshui were all the result of secularisation,appearing on a large scale from the Later Tang to the Southern Song dynasties and taking shape in abundance during the Ming and Qing dynasties,with manifestations that corresponded to the conditions of the times.With modernisation and secularisation,His shrine has not only a religious content,but also a secular service.How it will develop in the future can be further explored.From the case of Guo Shengwang’s beliefs,it may be possible to explore the development and evolution of other sacred sites in China,and even to complement and respond to the study of religious sacred sites in Western institutions.